Ephraim

Genesis 48 is an adoption scene with legal force. Jacob, dying, tells Joseph that his two Egyptian born sons are now Jacob's own, as much as Reuben and Simeon are, and that any children born to Joseph afterwards will be reckoned under their brothers' names. In one sentence Joseph disappears from the tribal list and is replaced by two tribes, which is how twelve tribes are still counted after Levi is set apart for the priesthood and given no territory.

Then the blessing. Joseph places Manasseh, the elder, at Jacob's right hand and Ephraim at his left, and Jacob crosses his arms so that the right hand falls on the younger. Joseph takes his father's hand to move it, saying he has made a mistake. Jacob refuses. He knows, he says, and the younger will be greater, and his descendants will become a multitude of nations.

The scene is the last in a series that runs through the whole of Genesis. Isaac is preferred over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Judah and Joseph over their elder brothers, Perez over Zerah at the moment of birth. Primogeniture is the assumed rule of the world the book describes, and the book overturns it in almost every generation it narrates.

Jacob adds a detail that outlives the scene. He tells Joseph that Israel will use the two boys as the formula of blessing: God make you as Ephraim and as Manasseh. That sentence is still said over sons in Jewish households on the eve of the Sabbath.

The Ephraimite hill country held the sanctuary at Shiloh, where the tabernacle and the ark stood before the monarchy and where Samuel was raised, and it held Bethel and Shechem, the two places where Israel is repeatedly said to have made covenant. Joshua, who led the conquest in the book that bears his name, was of Ephraim and was buried there. The territory was central, fertile and full of holy places, and the tribe behaved accordingly, quarrelling with Gideon and with Jephthah in Judges over not being called to a battle first.

When the kingdom split after Solomon, the leader of the northern secession, Jeroboam, was an Ephraimite, and the northern capital eventually settled at Samaria inside the same hill country. From that point the prophets use Ephraim as a name for the whole northern kingdom. Hosea, preaching in the north in its last decades, uses the word dozens of times, sometimes tenderly, as of a child taught to walk, and sometimes as a charge sheet. Isaiah warns Judah that within a fixed span Ephraim will be broken and no longer a people.

Assyria took Samaria in 722 BCE and deported its population, and the tribe as a political entity ends there. What survives is the name. The Samaritan community, still living in the same district, holds itself descended from Ephraim and Manasseh and maintains that its worship on Mount Gerizim is the older practice. And in later Jewish tradition a second messianic figure, Messiah ben Joseph or ben Ephraim, is expected to precede and to fall before the son of David, which keeps the northern claim alive in a form that survived the kingdom by millennia.